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The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c11: Lecture the Sixth. The Final Philosophy of the Veda

The Religion of the Veda: The Ancient Religion of India (from Rig-Veda to Upanishads) c11

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English

Lecture the Sixth. The Final Philosophy of the Veda

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Death and future life in paradise—Early notions of Hell—The idea of retribution—Limit of reward for good deeds—The noticn of "death-anew," or "re-death"—How comes the belief in transmigration—Hindu doctrine of transmigration—The method of transmigration—The doctrine of *karma*, or spiritual evolution—How transmigration and *karma* appear to Western minds—The pessimist theory of life—Cause of Hindu pessimism—Pessimism and the perfect principle (Brahma)—Dualistic pessimism—Salvation through realisation of one's own Brahmahood—The conception of the *ātman*, "breath," as life principle—Ātman, the soul of the Universe—Brahma, the spiritual essence of the Universe—Fusion of Ātman and Brahma—Māyā, or the world an illusion—The unknowableness of Brahma—Emerson's poem on the Brahma—The fulness of Brahma: a story of Yājnavalkya and his wife Maitreyī—Transition from philosophy to piety—Hindu asceticism—Professor Huxley's critique of asceticism—Pilgrim's progress under the religion of Brahma—Investiture and disciplehood—The life of the householder—The life of the forest-dweller and wandering ascetic—Ultima Thule.

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THE Veda's conception of the polytheistic gods, and the relations which the early Hindus have established with them by means of their songs of praise and nourishing gifts, are of a spirit very simple. The temper of these things almost guarantees beforehand equally simple notions about death and future life. There is a paradise above, conceived oftenest as a solar paradise, where the gods are having a delightful time. Man would be most happy to have a share in this delight, like the gods immortal. Therefore the gods are implored to let come to them the pious man that has spent his substance freely in their behalf.¹ Next, this elementary belief is fittingly padded out with simple rites and ancient legends. The bodies of the dead are burned and their ashes are consigned to earth. But this is viewed, symbolically, merely as an act of preparation—cooking it is called forthright—for that other life of joy. Arms and utensils, especially sacrificial utensils, are buried with the corpse. For the occupations and necessities of those "who have gone forth" (*preta*), as the dead are called euphemistically, are the same as upon the earth, sacrificing included. The righteous forefathers of old who have gone forth in the past—they have found another good place. Especially Yama, the first royal man, went forth as a pioneer to the distant heights in the skies. He searched and found a way for all his descendants. He went before and found a dwelling from which no power can debar mortal man. The Fathers of old have travelled it, and this path leads every earth-born mortal thither. There in the midst of highest heaven, in the lap of the Goddess Dawn, beams unfading light, there eternal waters flow. There Yama sits under a tree of beautiful foliage, engaged in an everlasting bout in the company of the gods; there mortals gather after death at Yama's call to behold Varuna. They have left all imperfections behind them on returning to their true home, the rich meadows of which no one can rob them. In that place there are no lame nor crooked of limb; the weak no longer pay tribute to the strong; all alike share with Yama and the gods the feast of the gods.

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¹ Rig-Veda 1. 31. 7; 91. 1; 125. 5, 6; 5. 55. 4; 63. 2.

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Underneath the coat of sugar the pill of death is bitter after all. Fitfully the Vedic Hindu regales himself with the hope of paradise, but his real craving is expressed in Vedic literature countless times: "May we live a hundred autumns, surrounded by lusty sons!" On the way to Yama the dead must pass the two broad-nosed, four-eyed dogs, the speckled and the dark; according to another turn of this myth these same dogs, originally sun and moon,¹ wander among men and pick the daily candidates that are to go on their last pilgrimage. Soon we hear of the foot-snare of Yama. Think or do what you will, death remains uncanny. The prospect of paradise is marred to some extent by visions of hell, the inevitable analogical opposite of paradise, that deep place of bottomless, blind darkness, which in a later time is fitted out with the usual gruesome stage-setting in the style of Dante's *Inferno*, or the wall-paintings in the Campo Santo at Pisa.

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¹ See above, p. 105.

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From the start there is the idea of retribution. To Yama's blissful seat only they who have done good may aspire. We remember the belief that the things sacrificed and given the priests (the *ishṭāpūrta*) await in highest heaven the faithful as a sort of twin guardian angels, securing for them bliss. On the other hand, the oppressors of the Brahmans, "they who spit upon the Brāhmana sit in the middle of a pool of blood chewing hair." . . . "The tears which did roll from the eyes of the oppressed, lamenting Brāhmana, these very ones, O oppressor of Brahmans, the gods did assign to thee as thy share of water."¹ In an early version of hell the sage Bhrigu observes some yelling men who are being cut up and devoured by other men who also yell: "So they have done to us in yonder world, so we do to them in return in this world."²

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¹ Atharva-Veda 5. 19. 3. and 13.

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² Çatapatha Brāhmana 11. 16. 1.

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But now the Hindu, subtle and at the same time naive, given over to rigid schematism and mechanical consistency, as all his intellectual history shows, becomes nervous about the permanence of life after death. What if the effect even of his good deeds should not last forever? What if, instead of the hoped-for immortality in yonder world, there be death again? One text fancies a limited immortality which lasts only a hundred years, that is, the ideal length of the life of man upon earth. The treasure of good deeds is after all finite; day and night, or, as we should say, time may exhaust the stock of one’s good works. In strict logic that must mean death anew. So we read in the Brāhmaṇa texts of fervent wishes and cunning rites potent to ensure imperishableness of one’s good works, and to cut off the possible recurrence of death.² There are also performances intended to secure to the deceased ancestors who, for aught one knows, are in the same danger of re-dying, genuine, instead of temporary and conditional immortality.³ This “death-anew,” or “re-death” (*punarmṛtyu*) as the Hindus call it, is an exceedingly characteristic idea, but it is not yet transmigration of souls. As long as its scene is located entirely in the other world, and as long as it is thought possible to avoid or cure it by the ordinary expedients of sacrifice, so long the essential character of that belief is not yet present. But the transition from one to the other was easy. If men can die in heaven there is no way, short of annihilation, to secure peace for anything that started out by being mortal. Next, the notion of "re-death" in the imagined world beyond was after all too shadowy; it lacked the practical data of experience. It was very natural to transplant the consequences of "re-death" to this earth, the home and hearth of death where men, like fish, die at every wink of the eye. He who must die again comes on to do it on earth where the trick is so well understood—lo and behold, we have the essential of metempsychosis, namely a succession of lives and deaths in the career of one and the same being. I am far from believing that even such smooth reasoning, taken by itself, suffices to account for the presence of this important doctrine in India. The germs of the belief in transmigration are very likely to have filtered into the Brahmanical consciousness from below, from popular sources, possibly from some of the aboriginal, non-Aryan tribes of India. Brahmanical religion has always borrowed immensely from folk beliefs and practices, and has always managed to impart to these borrowings the look of integral Brahmanical doctrine.

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¹ Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa 10. 1. 5. 4.

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² Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa 3. 11. 8. 5.

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³ Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa 12. 9. 3. 12.

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Like a will-o'-the-wisp the belief in transmigration¹ flares up in many parts of the world. We hear of it among the Egyptians and the Celts, but it has developed most significantly among the Greeks and Hindus. Its wide vogue is due to a fusion of some of the simplest observations and reasonings about life and death, such as can scarcely fail to come to the mind of primitive man. It is pure folk-lore. Three suppositions are required for this belief:

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¹ See Alfred Bertholet, *Seelenwanderung* (Nr. 2 of the iii. Series of *Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher*, edited by Professor Friederich Michael Schiele), Halle a. S. 1904.

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First, man has a soul, separate and separable from the body.

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Secondly, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects similarly have souls.

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Thirdly, all these souls can change their habitations.

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The belief that man has a soul depends in the main upon two observations: First, breath of life and its cessation after death. Life's breath is construed by primitive observers as an entity which lives with the living body and leaves it at death. When life's breath departs, the soul departs. Secondly, intercourse of the living with the dead continues in dreams and hallucinations. This shows that the dead after all exist. Primitive man does not recognise illusions.

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The belief in animal and plant souls, and even souls of inanimate objects (fetish), is based upon the same sort of simple logic. Animals have both life's breath and some measure of reason. Nomads, cattle-raisers, hunters, inhabitants of forest and sea-coast are thrown into intimate intercourse, each with particular classes of animals whose mental resources are not only obvious, but often clash with man's interests. Clear up into the high literature of beast fable and fairy-tale survives the folk's very real belief in reasoning, soul-inhabited animals: see Reynard the Fox and Bre'r Rabbit. Primitive man, too, in the search after his own origin has often blundered into the notion that man is descended from one or the other animal. This has given rise to the very important religious, political, and economic institutions known as Totemism.

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As regards plants, the Hindu Law-Book of Manu forbids the chewing of red rosin, doubtless because it looks like coagulated blood, and blood must not be drunk.¹ The tree is supposed to be alive. The weird twilight shapes of trees and plants, the sough of the wind in the leaves of the forest-trees again suggest life in the vegetable kingdom.

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¹ See von Negelein, *Archiv für Religionswissenschaft*, vi., 246.

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As regards inanimate things, we need but remember the child's relation to its doll, or, that children punish with their own oft-tasted penalties the stick over which they stumble. In brief, the nearer or remoter analogies of human life which pervade, or seem to pervade all objects in nature present themselves to early man as guarantees or suggestions of universal animation, of souls present in every shapen thing.

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And now the passage of these souls from one kind of receptacle to another, from man to man, from man to animal, plant, or stock, or stone, follows inevitably. The records of primitive beliefs are full of it. I will merely remind you of the belief in werwolves as one instance of this kind. In the final outcome of all these notions some peoples, eager to account for the destiny of man after death, have assumed a chain of variegated existences. And with this goes very generally some notion of evolution forward or backward. The character of the creature in a certain given existence controls the degree of the next existence. This last bit of logic has flowered out in India as the important doctrine of *karma* or "deed."¹

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¹ See below p. 259.

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As far as India is concerned one thing is certain: real metempsychosis does not enter into the higher thought of India, or, at least, is not stated unmistakably until we come to the Upanishads. When, however, this belief has finally taken shape we find in it the following established items of faith: Every living creature is reborn in some organic shape; every living creature had a previous existence; and every living creature is again and again the prey of death, until in some life all desire and all activity as the outcome of desire shall have been laid aside. This is the Hindu salvation, namely, absolute resignation of the finite, futile, illusory world; cessation of the will to live, and the act of living. This of itself produces union with Brahma. Not until mortal man has cast off every desire of his heart does he enter immortal into Brahma. We have now arrived at the thought or the position of the Upanishads, the last in the long line of Vedic texts. Like all Vedic thought, the thought of the Upanishads is not systematic, but tentative, fanciful, and even romantic. It feels its way through misty, wavering, sometimes conflicting beginnings. The more rigid conclusions come later on in one or the other of the so-called systems of Hindu philosophy.

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Still even in the Upanishads so important a doctrine must be established on reason. There are two questions to be asked. First, why must the soul wander from life to life; secondly, why does its habitation differ from life to life, liable to reincarnation: at one time as an animal high or low; at another as a human being of various degrees; and at yet another even as a god? For our convenience we may answer the second question first. The celebrated Law-Book of Manu, at a time when this doctrine has become cut and dried, teaches that a Brahman priest who steals the substance which has been entrusted to him for sacrifice to the gods will in his next existence become a vulture or a crow.¹ Why? Because the vulture and the crow make their living by stealing food. Briefly, man is what he does.

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¹ Manu 11. 25.

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Note the superb moral possibilities of this teaching. This is the well-known doctrine of *karma*, or “deed,” now famous wherever men are interested in the evolution of the human mind. Deed and the will, or “desire,” as the Hindus call it, back of the deed, are essentially one and the same thing. On desire man’s nature is founded; as his desires so are his endeavors, as his endeavors so are his deeds. By his deeds the character of his next birth in the round of existences is regulated, for he is himself the sum of his own deeds. If his *karma* in a given life has accumulated for him a good balance, as it were, the next life will be delightful and noble; conversely, if his life is evil, the next birth will be, consequently, as a low and degraded being. Life is character—character inherited and inherent from previous existence, and character modelled and shaped by the deeds of the present existence. Now we may answer the first question, namely, Why must the soul wander at all? The answer is: No deed leads the way to salvation, to release from life and union with Brahma. Aye, to be sure, as the fragrance of a tree in blossom so the fragrance of a good deed is wafted afar, saith the Chāndogya Upanishad.¹ But even the best deed is a thing from its very nature limited and vitiated by the finite. It rewards itself, it punishes itself, according to a process of automatic psychic evolution, but the fruit of the finite can itself be only finite:

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¹ 5. 10. 9.

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“Yājnavalkya,” says Ārtabhāga in the “Great Forest Upanishad,”² “if, after the death of this man, his speech goes into fire, his breath into wind, his eye into the sun, his mind into the moon, his ear into the directions of space, his body into the earth, his self (*ātman*) into ether, the hair of his body into plants, the hair of his head into trees, his blood and semen into water,—what then becomes of the man?” Then spake Yājnavalkya: “Take me by the hand, my dear! Ārtabhāga, we two must come to an understanding about this privately, not here among people.” And they went out and consulted. And what they said was DEED (*karma*), and what they praised was DEED: ‘Verily, one becomes good through good deed, evil through evil deed.”

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² Brihadāraṇyaka Upanishad 3. 2. 13.

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Later in the same tract¹ Yājnavalkya describes the departure of the soul from the body and its consequences to man: “Then his knowledge and his works and his previous experience take him by the hand. As a caterpillar which has wriggled to the tip of a blade of grass draws itself over to (a new blade), so does this man, after he has put aside his body, draw himself over to a new existence. . . Now verily they say: ‘Man is altogether desire (*kāma*); as is his desire so is his insight (*kratu*); as is his insight so is his deed (*karma*); as is his deed so is his destiny.’”

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¹ Brihadāraṇyaka Upanishad 4. 4. 3; *see also* Brahma Upanishad, chapter the first.

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More than one Western reader, when he ponders the doctrine of transmigration as rooted in desire and deed, is likely to ask the question why the Hindus did not rest content with its outcome. The bulk of their spiritual energy in Brahmanism, as well as in Buddhism and the other Hindu sects, is expended in the effort to break the chain that ties man to existence. Why is this so? The Western man, if I gauge him aright, is willing to tarry in the life garden of will, desire, and deed, plucking its fruits and flowers at the risk of an occasional prick from its thorns, or sting from its noxious insects. We want more life, fuller life. Here are some of the points connected with transmigration that are naturally sympathetic to Western minds:

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1. Love of life, and abhorrence of annihilation: transmigration ensures life in some form for ever and ever.

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2. The twin ghosts of fatalism and predestination are laid. Where will and deed, with character as their result, rule every destiny, nothing is accidental, nothing is pre-determined. Man himself, free from outside interference, is the arbiter of his own destiny.

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3. It involves the perfection of retribution: reward and punishment adjust themselves automatically and organically to virtue and vice. It opens wide the door of hope to the lowly and oppressed, and checks the excesses of the cruel mighty. Byron’s despairing,

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“Methinks we have sinned in some old world
And this is Hell,”

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loses its sting. It is mere justice. But it is the justice that knows how to reward merit just as unerringly, as it knows how to punish sin inexorably. There is no human being so hedged in by calamity, vice, and degradation, but what he or she may start on the upward road by some act of determination for good. If the wish, “Grant me my heaven now,” fails of fulfilment, who knows that it may not be fulfilled in the train of heroic effort?

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And yet the deep-seated instinct of life which makes men all over the earth, India included, wail their dead, goes hand in hand in all higher forms of Hindu religion with the apparently sincere expression of a desire to be released from life. Pessimism, at first negative, in the end positive and profound, becomes the ruling theory of Hindu life. With all the attractions, fascinations, and beauties of life, life is felt to be a fetter, or a knot which ties the heart to the world of sense; and release (*moksha*) from the everlasting round of lives (*samsāra*) is the Hindu salvation (*nirvāṇa*). Buddhism later on expresses the urgent need of salvation from existence in its well-known fourfold doctrine of suffering. Its first clause establishes the truth of suffering: Birth is suffering; age is suffering; disease is suffering; union with what is not loved is suffering; separation from what is loved is suffering. The conviction that all life is futile is expressed hardly less distinctly in the Great Forest Upanishad (3. 5. 2), where hunger and thirst, woe and delusion, age and death, desire for children, and desire for possessions are lumped alike as the evils and vanities of life, before the highest knowledge has been attained.¹ Anyhow, all the principal Hindu systems of religion and philosophy start out with the assurance that the world is full of suffering, and that is their particular business to account for it and to remove it.

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¹ “How many births are past, I cannot tell; How many yet to come, no man can say: But this alone I know, and know full well, That pain and grief embitter all the way.” (South-Indian Folk-song, quoted in the Rev. Dr. John Morrison’s *New Ideas in India*, p. 213.)

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We must not forget that the perpetual decay and death and replacement which is the gist of human life when looked at purely from the outside is not redeemed in India by any theory, or instinctive faith in general advancement. There is in all Hindu thought no expression of hope for the race, no theory of betterment all along the line. Each individual must attend to his own uplifting that is to free him from a world whose worthlessness is condemned in unmeasured terms. Admitting that this is to no small extent mere theory; that the average Hindu worries along, sustained by life, hope, sunshine, and what not, whence the theory?

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The question has frequently been put point blank: How did Hindu pessimism originate? I believe that the answer, or at least a partial answer, may be made with some degree of certainty, to wit: India herself, through her climate, her nature, and her economic conditions, furnishes reasonable ground for pessimism. As regards economic conditions political economists say that the value of human life in any country may be estimated by the average wage of its earners. A low caste servant may to-day be engaged for a wage of five cents a day out of which he must, owing to caste laws, find his own keep, and possibly that of a family besides. India's nature is more malignant than that of any other civilised country. The floods of great rivers devastate at times entire districts; per contra, when the rains are withheld at the time of the capricious monsoons, famine with plague or cholera in its wake, decimate the population. The tribe of venomous serpents and the blood-lust of the tiger claim their regular quota of victims.

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Our first acquaintance with the Aryan Hindus in the hymns of the Veda shows them to us a sturdy, life-loving people on the banks, or in the region of the river Indus, the land of the five streams, the modern Punjab in Northwestern India. That country they had conquered, fresh from the highlands that separate India from Iran. By successive contests, hinted at in a very interesting legend of the Brāhmaṇa texts¹ they advanced eastward, until they had overrun the plain of the Ganges—the hottest civilised land on the face of the earth. This is the land of Hindu theosophy, the land of the Upanishads, the land where Buddha preached, some centuries after the earliest Upanishads. Buddha's most famous sermon was delivered at Benares, in the very centre of the plain of the Ganges. There in the land of Bengal, if anywhere on the face of the civilised earth, the doubts and misgivings that beset human life at its best might permanently harden into the belief that life is a sorry affair. Hindu literature that comes from these lands shows us that the Aryans did not succumb to this change, for they remain a great and remarkable people. But this habitat of theirs unquestionably left an indelible impression on their character. The mental subtleness of the race did not perish, but their bodies suffered; hypochondria, melancholia, dyspepsia—call it what we may—conquered the conquering Aryan, whose stock was no doubt the product of a more northerly and invigorating climate.

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¹ Çatapatha Brāhmaṇa I. 4. I. 10–18.

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Now it is time to remember once more that the conception of the One True Being—let us now call it Brahma—had risen to a considerable height, apparently long before the doctrine of transmigration had taken hold of the Hindu mind, and established in it the theory of despair of the world. Even aside from such a theory it is natural for the mind of man in every clime and time to evolve some great power that is behind the phenomena of the world, to establish to its own satisfaction some sort of perfect principle that is underneath this obviously imperfect world, and then to long for some kind of association with that power or principle. So teach us all higher religions and religious philosophies. Without doubt the Hindus did this before pessimism and independently of pessimism. But when pessimism began to taint the Hindu view of life, then the eternal all-force, the root of all, the One True and Perfect Thing offered the only logical escape terms the existence of evil. We Westerners have learned one way or another to endure this naughty world fairly well. But when it becomes too bad we are apt to remember that the refuge is with the Omnipotent Power. That is the silver lining to the cloud of human existence. The Hindu mind turns this the other way; the silvery sheen of Brahma has a cloud lining. The conception of this One True Being, out of which flow all visible things, might have been an anchor of strength and a head-spring of hope and joy for the Hindus. A palpably possible consequence of their thought is, that all men have the divine or Brahmic spark, that all are microcosms, flung off—for some reason—by that superb macrocosm, the Brahma. If so, then individual human existence must be based upon truth and wholesomeness, no less than the Universal Brahma. Not so did the Hindus proceed. They lavish upon the Brahma all imaginable attributes of perfection, and then proceed to apply the same standard to this world: of course they find it by contrast a very sorry affair. The world ceases to be a desirable home in which one may live, sustained perhaps by the hope of better things to come, because it is measured by the standard of Brahma and found wanting. When the Brahma is praised, that Brahma which is lifted above hunger and thirst, above grief and worry, above old age, decay, and death, the persistent personal application is, that this world of creatures is full of hunger, thirst, grief, worry, old age, decay, and death.

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There is yet one consequence to be drawn. The question is asked, as it must be: "What is the cure for desire, the thirst for life and its contents? How cut the fetter, or the knot of adhesion to the illusory world? How get rid of the will to live?" The answer is, through knowledge. Knowledge, or perhaps it would be better to say intuition, of the unity of the individual self with the great True One; and the recognition, ever present, of the divided, distracted, illusory nature of everything finite: When a mortal has recognised Brahma, feeling, "He is myself," how can he longer desire and cling to bodily life? This is the culminating thought of the Upanishads and the Veda, expressed in the solemn three words *tat tvam asi*, "Thou art That." That is to say, the essence of man is itself Brahma. The wise man when once he has seen That (*tad apaçyat*), becomes That (*tad abhavat*), because in truth he always was and is That (*tad āsīt*).¹ Thus the final attainment of man is this knowledge; it is the "works" of the Jew, and the "faith" of the Christian—salvation by the complete ascendency of the divine in one’s self, and the consequent submergence of all that is temporal and illusory.

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¹ See Vājasaneyi Saṃhitā (Tadeva Upanishad), 32. 12.

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It is time now that we return to the last question which I propounded for to-day’s lecture. How did the *brahma*, the One, the Universal spirit, finally shape himself from out of the mass of ideas whose constant drift was in the direction of oneness, or, as we may finally call it, monistic pantheism? One of the main circumstances of the higher religious thought of the time just preceding the Upanishads was a strong monotheistic tendency which seemed to develop simultaneously and peacefully along with the monistic ideas, such as the “That,” the “Only,” the “Being.”

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In the Upanishads monotheism is practically at an end, whereas the attempts to designate the abstract conceptions just mentioned emerge from the stage of tremulous venture to confident and familiar statement. Yet they are not any one of them the final name of the Universal Being. Even the Upanishad mind seems to prefer something more tangible and suggestive, something that after all has attributes.

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In the seething caldron of the earlier speculation there occur yet two other conceptions which have become pretty well crystallised even before the time of the Upanishads. The first of these is the conception of the *ātman*, which means first “breath,” and then “self.” As far as the early poetry is concerned there is not the least doubt about the primary meaning of *ātman*.¹ It is familiarly correlated with wind, “the breath of the gods.”² The *ātman* or soul of man after death returns to mingle with the wind from which it is supposed to have come.³ The later Veda abounds in crude and fanciful psycho-physical observations in which the parts and functions of the human body, the little cosmos, are correlated more or less skilfully with the phenomena of the outer world, the big cosmos. An important thought of this sort is, that the human body is pervaded by plural breaths, *prāṇas* or *ātmans*; these vivify the body, and are the essential part, the *ego*, of the living individual. Several of the older Upanishads contain a fable, resembling the Latin fable of “the belly and the members.” The vital powers are quarrelling among themselves for supremacy. They bring their case before Prajāpati, “the lord of creatures.” Prajāpati advises them to leave the body one by one and to observe which loss affects it most. The voice, the eye, the ear, the mind departed, discommoding the body quite a good deal. But when the breath was on the point of departing, "just as the proud steed from the Indus would pull and tear the pegs of his tether, so it pulled and tore the other vital powers." And they yielded the palm to the *ātman*. Hence a text declares: "From the *ātman* all the members spring into existence. Of all things that come into existence the *ātman* is the first."

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¹ For the meaning of *tman*, the reduced stem of the same word in the pronominal sense of “self,” see the author in *American Journal of Philology*, xvi., p. 421.

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² Rig-Veda 7. 87. 2; 10. 168. 4.

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³ *Ibid.*, 10. 16. 3; 90. 13; 92. 13.

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The *ātmans*, or breaths, are finally conceived as coming from a single *ātman*, the universal breath, or self, or *ego*. A Brāhmana text declares: "Ten (kinds of) breath dwell in man; the universal *ātman* is the eleventh: all the breaths are contained in him." That is, the *ātman*, after its supreme place in the own self has been permanently fixed, is transferred on exactly the same terms to the universe outside of man. The *ātman*, the lord of breaths, is at the same time the lord of the gods, the creator of all beings; all the worlds are an emanation of his great universal self: finally the *ātman* is the all.

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It is easy to see that with all the refinement of the term *ātman* in its final outcome, it certainly has a strong physical touch, at least in the beginning of its use. The final shaping of the idea consisted in associating, or rather fusing, with this *ātman* another conception, coming from a totally different quarter, namely, the olden Vedic sphere of devotion, prayer, holy performance, in fact religion in general. Even in the Vedic hymns, as we have seen, the epithet "Goddess" is freely given to the numerous names for prayer, devotion, religious emotion, and kindred ideas. Unquestionably the *sāvitrī* stanza owes its puzzlingly paramount position in Hindu religion to the same estimate of devotion as a thing essentially divine.¹ We have also made acquaintance with a symbolic "Lord of Prayer," Brihaspati, an important, but not lasting attempt to pour the sacred function of the poets and priests into the mould of a personal god. He marks one of those false starts towards personal monotheism in which the later Veda abounds. More and more the sacred word, the constant companion of the sacrifice, is felt to be a kind of uplifting spiritual essence. The sacred word is ˙*brahma*. Starting as prayer,² charm, sacred formula, religious act, it becomes the symbol of holy thought and holy utterance (λόγος), the outpouring of the soul in its highest longings. It is the best wish of a spiritually minded and gifted people that becomes for a while personal god, and at last the divine essence of the universe. The conception is intellectually not as subtle and abstract as the monistic philosophical conception of “That Only True Being,” which comes entirely from the head. But from the point of view of heart-felt emotion it is the most exalted divine conception of gentile folk. Such is *the brahma*, used in the neuter gender, not yet the masculine God Brahma who, after a renewed personification is placed at the head of the later Hindu so-called trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, and Çiva: “The *brahma* is the word, the truth in the word is *brahma*. Through *brahma* heaven and earth are held together.”

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¹ See above, p. 202.

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² Professor Oldenberg regards "zauberfluidum" as the original meaning of *brahma*. But does "magic essence" really explain, and does it not itself stand in need of explanation? Anyway it seems to me that this distinguished scholar's present sympathy with what may be called ethnological explanations of religious phenomena, that is the theory that such phenomena must necessarily begin somewhere in the lowest bathos of savage folk belief, is leading him on a trail farther than that trodden by this word.

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The two conceptions of *ātman* and *brahma*, in their origin, respectively, the physical and spiritual essences of the universe, are fused into one conception. They are used in general as synonyms. Still there is a tendency to use *brahma*, “Holy Thought,” as the designation of the universal principle in the outer world; *ātman*, “Self,” as the same principle in the inner life of man. The conviction that the *brahma* without and the *ātman* within are one and the same, that is the real religion of the Upanishads. The power which operates in the universe, creating, sustaining, and destroying, the power behind this imperfect world that perchance moves on to some final development; the power that manifests itself in every living thing;—this eternal power is identical with our own innermost and truest self, equally imperishable when stripped of all its external and accidental circumstances. This conviction is embalmed in the famous words, *tat tvam asi*, “Thou art That,” or *aham brahma asmi*, “I am the Brahma.” These are the slogans of higher religious thought; and they contain the corollary that the world of things which we see in space, as we ideally assume it to be with our eyes and bodies, themselves phenomena, are mere shadows cast by the one truth—the innermost Personal Self identical with the outer Universal Self, the *brahma-ātman*.¹

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¹ The Catholic mystic, Johannes Scheffler, called Angelus Silesius (born 1624), arrives at the same end in a stanza of his collection of poems called *Cherubinischer Wandersmann*:

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Now we have seen that our empirical knowledge which shows us a manifold variegated world where in truth there is only *brahma*, and a body where there is in truth only *ātman*, or the *brahma* in ourselves, that all that is mere ignorance, distraction, or illusion. The things that are unfolded before our eyes in space, those things to which we ourselves belong with our ponderable bodies, are not true entities, they are not

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“Ich bin so gross wie Gott,
Er ist wie ich so klein;
Ich kann nicht unter ihm,
Er über mich nicht sein.”

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the *ātman*. As long as this is not recognised, the Hindus say there is *avidyā* "ignorance," or, more literally and philosophically "nescience." Or they say that there is *māyā* "illusion." All else aside from this single truth is a mere mirage in the desert, and is so far as it must after all have some kind of a connection with Brahma, have some reality in Brahma, it is no more real than the reflection of the real moon which we see trembling on the ripple of the waters. Even the very conception of nescience or illusion is, of course, not real, because it can be annihilated, and whatever is temporary is not real. What induced the time-less, space-less, and cause-less Brahma to enter upon the escapade of this phenomenal world of time, space, and causality, the Hindu thinkers cannot tell us. Their mythology is full of crude ideas of the primitive being's loneliness and desire to multiply, but these ideas belong to the lower forms of their religion; they are not entertained by their philosophers. This is the point where Hinduism like every system of idealistic philosophy breaks down. Plato's *τὸ ὄντως ὄν*; the *ens realissimum*; Kant's *ding an sich*; the Upanishads' "That only True" are all very well, but the world of phenomena to explain that—aye there's the rub. This pesky world of plural things, full of irrational quantities—why does it exist, and is it not pounding along toward some end that will show a uniting principle? With that kind of suggestion the Hindu will have nothing to do. Entranced by the absolute reality of the one Brahma he wafts away the world of experience as a conjurer an optical delusion.

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Into the maze of difficulties and inconsistencies which opens out here we need not go. The manifold modifications, adjustments, and the trimming down of the main thought which the Upanishads are driven to undertake belong to philosophy rather than religion. According to the Upanishads' own definition of the *ātman*, everything that these works undertake to say about anything other than the *ātman* is mere figure of speech, and every definition of the *ātman* itself is also figure of speech. Every definition is necessarily stopped by the words: "No, No" (*na neti*). The Brahma has no attributes (*nirguṇa*). Yea, the Hindu when in the proper mood, advancing straight to the last consequence, looking neither to the right nor to the left, denies the possibility of knowing Brahma altogether. Tremendous paradox this, considering all depends upon the intuition of this very conception. In a conversation with his wife Maitreyī¹ the great thinker Yājnavalkya asserts that there is no consciousness after death, because there must be two in order that one should see the other, smell, hear, address, understand, recognise the other. "But if one has himself become *Ātman* (that is, "Self") by means of what and whom should he then see? By means of what and whom should he then smell, hear, address, understand, recognise?" In brief and dry language, being himself the subject, and there being no object, there is no cognition nor consciousness.

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¹ Brihadāraṇyaka Upanishad 2. 4. 12 *ff*.

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Emerson's keen and terse poem on the Brahma in which the Brahma itself speaks, approaches this idea of absolute unity. But the chilly sombre theme is made warm and glowing in these lines which may be counted among the best in the English language:

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If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

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Far and forgot to me is near,
Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
And one to me are shame and fame.

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They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt.
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.

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The strong gods pine for my abode
And pine in vain, the Sacred Seven;
But thou meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

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But we are concerned with the value of the Upanishads as religion, in a world which for practical purposes must be admitted to be real, for man who for practical purposes must be admitted to be real. The Çvetāçvatara Upanishad starts out with the old question :

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Whence are we born ? Whereby do we live, and whither do we go ? O ye who know Brahma, tell us at whose command we abide here, whether in pain or in pleasure ? Should Time, or nature, or necessity, or chance, or the elements be considered as the cause, or he who is called Purusha, that is, the Supreme Spirit ?

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The Upanishads answer for practical purposes : The Supreme Spirit that is alike in the universe and in man—that is the essence of all. It is Being, without a second, without beginning and without end, without limitations of any kind. Whatever there is, or seems to be, mind and matter, nature and man, is one substance only, namely, Brahma. The same Yājnavalkya, whose desperately rationalistic answer to his wife Maitreyī we have just heard, takes also a more human view of the Ātman. This is told in the frame of a quaint little story, as follows¹ :

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¹ Brihadāranyaka Upanishad 2. 4 and 4. 5.

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Yājnavalkya had two wives, Maitreyī and Kātyāyanī. Of these two Maitreyī knew how to discourse about the

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*brahma*; Kātyāyanī, on the other hand, knew only what women are supposed to understand. Now Yājnavalkya desired to change his life of householder to that of religious hermit.

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"Maitreyī," says he, "I shall now retire from the condition of householder, and as a preliminary divide my goods between thee and Kātyāyanī." Then spake Maitreyī: "If, O lord, this whole earth with all its wealth belonged to me, would I then become immortal, or not?" "By no means," replies Yājnavalkya. "Only like the life of the rich would thy life be; wealth does not carry with it the expectation of immortality." Then replied Maitreyī: "That through which I do not become immortal, what good is that to me? Expound to me rather thy knowledge." Then Yājnavalkya: "Truly thou wast previously dear to us, beloved lady, and now thou hast increased our love. Well then, I shall expound it to thee; attend then, to what I say: All things of the world, and every relation in the world are dear to us not because of their own value, but because of the *ātman*, their true essence. Wife, husband, sons, wealth; the high stations of priest and warrior; the worlds, the gods, the Veda, and the sacrifice are dear to us not because of their own value, but because of the *ātman*, their true essence. As one grasps the tones of an instrument with the instrument itself so are grasped all things when the *ātman* is grasped. Truly he that hath seen, heard, recognised, and understood the *ātman* he knows the whole world."¹

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¹ *Cf. Rāmakrishna, His Life and Sayings*, p. 135 (number 161).

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We may be sure that Yājnavalkya does not really intend to expound to his beloved Maitreyī the extremes of super-sensual rationalism. In effect he expresses the ideal of union with the supreme being, the ultimate endeavor of all religions that have evolved a supreme being worth uniting with. At a later period there comes out of the permanently untenable, cool intellectualism of the Upanishads the religion of the Bhāktas or "pious devotees." The destiny of Upanishad thought is, after all, an acute and mystic monotheism, very like the mysticism of those Christian "friends of god," John Tauler and Thomas à Kempis. By knowledge they discover the Supreme Intelligence and perceive its essence; by devotion (*bhakti*) they feel the sweetness of the Supreme Being and reciprocate its loving intent. So the Bhagavadgītā, the "Song of the Celestial," can finally make the Supreme Being say of the pious man: "Through love he recognises me in truth, my greatness and my essence. He that loves me is not lost." It comes to this finally, that knowledge of the Supreme is but a preparation for what we call love of God. In the words of the modern Bengāli Saint and Ascetic Rāmakrishna: "The Knowledge of God may be likened to a man, while the Love of God is like a woman. Knowledge has entry only up to the outer rooms of God, but no one can enter into the inner mysteries of God save a lover, for a woman has access even to the privacy of the Almighty.”¹ And finally the same thinker arrives at the last possible conclusion: “Knowledge and love of God are ultimately one and the same. There is no difference between pure knowledge and pure love.” We might have predicted the same result. To a religion which strives with all its might to know the truth, truth’s sister, love, does not long remain a stranger.

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¹ *Rāmakrishna, His Life and Sayings*, p. 138 (number 172).

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Yājnavalkya, as we have seen, abandons his wives and goes to live in the forest. Such “Forest-Hermits” (ὑλόβιοι) must have been common in India several centuries before Christ. Buddha criticises them, and declares himself as against their ascetic life and practices as a hindrance rather than a help to a life of perfect freedom from passions and desires, a life of true emancipation. He himself advocates moderation in all things, salvation included. He prefers the “middle of the road,” as both he and we say (the *media via*, or *madhyama-mārga*). About 300 b.c. a clever Greek by the name of Megasthenes was the ambassador of the Græco-Persian king Seleukos at the court of Chandragupta in the city of Pātaliputra (311–302 b.c.). Chandragupta—Sandrakottos or Sandrokyptos as the Greeks called him—had succeeded, after the death of Alexander the Great, in founding the great Indian empire of the Maurya dynasty, the largest empire known up to that time in India. Megasthenes wrote a work called *Indica* which contains much important information about the India of his day. He tells that these ascetics were indifferent to the good or evil that happens to man; that all being, in their opinion, is dreamlike illusion; that they regard the world as created and perishable; and believe that God who has created it pervades it completely. Considering the source, this is an uncommonly good description of the pessimistic pantheism of the Upanishads. Alexander the Great himself was much impressed with these "Sages of the Forest." He sent one Onesikritos to talk with them. After having been laughed at by the ascetics for his full dress of mantle, hat, and boots, and told to lie naked upon the stones if he would learn from them, he was finally initiated into the Hindu idea, to wit, that the best doctrine is that which removes not only sorrow but also joy from the soul of man.

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Professor Huxley in his *Evolution and Ethics* (p. 65) has subjected the Hindu ideal to severe criticism. According to him the *summum bonum* of the Hindu is a state of impassive quasi-somnambulism which but for its acknowledged holiness might run the risk of being confounded with idiocy. It leads to the abandonment of property, social ties, family affections, and common companionship, until all that remains of a man is the impassive attenuated mendicant monk, self-hypnotised into cataleptic trances which the deluded mystic takes for foretastes of final union with Brahma. Professor Huxley has in mind the extreme case of Yogin of the later time, who confounds hocus-pocus and humbug with religion. As a matter of fact the Upanishad religion is a religion of perfect freedom, and equally as a matter of fact the religious of the Upanishads do find it advisable as a rule to retire from active life after having done their duty in active life.

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Yājnavalkya’s step marks not only the new order of thought but also the new order of life which the religion of the *ātman-brahma* imposes upon India. In fact we may say that henceforth India leads a double life. The first is the life of every day. The fragile human creature enters through the mother’s womb, where it has been protected by the pious prayers and ceremonies of its parents, into the bewildering sunshine of this world. If it only knew it, it would be glad that the *karma* of its former existence entitles its soul in the present existence to the shelter of a human body, howsoever lowly. Worse might have happened in the hazard of the lottery of transmigration. Birth means that the soul in question has not yet joined Brahma. He who has not done so, alas, is born again as worm or as fly; as fish or as fowl; as lion or as boar; as bull or as tiger, or man; or as something else—any old thing as we might say—in this place or in that place, according to the quality of his works, and the degree of his knowledge, that is in accordance with the doctrine of *karma*.¹ Thanks to the past the present is secure: worse might have happened than to pass through the temporary shelter of a human mother's body into the more enduring shelter of the mother's love. The Hindu mother, like any other mother, rejoices in her child, especially if he is a boy, and asks no questions about his ultimate cosmic destiny. Father and mother now bend every energy to raise the child so that he may become an honored member of the Brahmanical community, beloved alike of god and man. The Hindu books of Rules of Home Life, the so-called Grihyasūtras,² tell a touching story of the pious care with which the child is piloted through infancy. Indeed the life of the Brahmanical Hindu is sacramental throughout. Every important phase of his life has its own sacraments. The most important of them are the investiture by his teacher with the sacred cord, and his marriage.

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¹ Kāushītaki Upanishad 1. 2.

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² See above, p. 41.

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This investiture is looked upon as a spiritual second birth, or regeneration. The little mortal becomes a man in a higher sense, because his teacher teaches him the Veda, syllable by syllable, word by word, stanza by stanza. During the period of his disciplehood he is the devoted servant of his teacher who, throughout Hindu tradition, is regarded as even better entitled to respect than his own parents. No matter how rich and powerful his own family, he now lives obedient to his teacher, taking care of his wants to the point of gathering his fire-wood and begging for him in the village, humble and chaste in his own life. In return he obtains from his teacher the sacred knowledge, the Veda. Especially, the sacrosanct Sāvitrī, that famous brief stanza¹ which at an early time carries within it the presentiment of the deep theosophy that is to come, by placing in the relation of cause and effect the physical and spiritual essences of the universe:

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¹ Rig-Veda 3. 62. 10; see above, p. 86.

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"That lovely glory of Savitar,
The heavenly god, we contemplate:
Our pious thoughts he shall promote."

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After he has absolved the study of the Veda he becomes a full-grown man. The teacher, according to the beautiful account of the Taittirīya Upanishad (1. 11), dismisses his pupil with the following last injunction: "Tell the truth; do your duty, do not neglect the study of the Veda! After having given to your teacher your gift of love, see to it that the thread of your race be not cut off! Do not neglect truth, duty, health, property, and the study of the Veda! Honor your mother as a god! Honor your father as a god! Honor your teacher as a god! Honor your guest as a god! Live an irreproachable life; honor your superior; give alms in true spirit! When in doubt follow the judgment of Brahmans of tried authority!"

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